


no promises

by aheadfulloffollies



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Angst, Catra (She-Ra) Needs a Hug, Catra (She-Ra) Redemption, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Minor Adora/Catra (She-Ra), POV Catra (She-Ra), catra on horde prime's ship, i'm not great at writing angst but i hope this is ok??, implied catradora, mild catradora
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28319451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aheadfulloffollies/pseuds/aheadfulloffollies
Summary: On Horde Prime's ship, Catra decides to do the right thing, for once.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	no promises

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nightmare_insomnia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightmare_insomnia/gifts).



> MERRY CHRISTMAS MAR I'M YOUR SECRET SANTA HEHEHEHE >:))))
> 
> anyway i really hope you like this because i'm not great at hurt no comfort but,,,,,, i tried.

In the index of Catra’s  mind, there was a list of all the promises she and Adora had made to each other, big and small. Everything from always being together to not eating the last bit of contraband cake. Once, the routine memories brought her comfort. Some time later, hope. After that, a clawing desperation.

Now, all that was left was pain and the ache left behind in the place of everything that had been taken away.

Some people believed in a God. Catra didn’t, but she wanted to find every single one of them right now and laugh and laugh. Cruelty was an addicting poison, to both the victim and the perpetrator, and if God existed, He’d gotten high off the power long ago. Not that she could blame Him, when she’d done the same.

It was so fucking easy to take pain and wield it like a sword, on herself and anyone in her way. It was the only control she had left, and even now, she wanted it badly, the aftershocks of remission shaking her mind until it was bound to crumble and fall apart.

It was a miracle it hadn’t already.

But even in the absence of anger or blame, Catra held not a single shred of hope.

Promises were bullshit, and the people who believed them set themselves up for failure. That was all she knew, and she’d repeated it to herself so many times in the past hours that the words felt like white noise in her mind. But she had to remind herself, or else she was overcome with the immense desire, even more intense than that to claw out her own skin from inside out, to think about the possibility of a better world. One with hope and happiness and futures in store for people like her.

She wanted to scream.

She was trapped in a ship with a psycho robot ruler of the universe whose dreadlocks mocked her culture, the person Adora replaced Catra with, and a million clones in between, and her biggest problem was that she wanted to fucking  _ scream _ . But that would be disruptive and confusing and probably send an army of said clones to force her to Horde Prime’s feet. So she didn’t.

Screaming, the more she thought about it, seemed like a rather fitting response to everything that had happened to her in the past three years. It was, after all, a painfully inadequate way of expressing anything that was happening right now, but it got the job done.

There were no more tasks to complete though, and that terrified Catra, an electric static line of anxiety like a vein through her heart at the knowing that she’d done it  _ all _ and still failed. The impossibility of it was tangible in her mind. Who had ever tried so much and still not gotten it right?

Maybe Shadow Weaver was right, and she really was just a failure from the beginning. It certainly would explain a lot. After all, she’d reached the height of achievement, the best position she could ever hope for, and she’d ended up with Horde fucking Prime and Sparkles and Adora was nowhere to be seen.

Though it was hard to decide, the most painful part of this might have been knowing that Adora was going to come. Her heart beat faster at the thought, but nearly stopped all together when she reminded herself that it would not be her she came to save. Glimmer, unlike Catra, was a good person. A decent woman and a lovely soul, who tried her best and treated people well and lived life in a way that helped others.

There was no reason why Adora  _ shouldn’t  _ come for Glimmer. Catra didn’t even have a reason to hate her anymore. She was everything Catra was not, and her heart  _ ached  _ like a fucking open wound but she was  _ glad _ Adora had found someone like her to spend the rest of life with.

And yet. It would be nice, she thought, tears welling in her tired eyes, to have someone come for her.

Just once. One more time, before she accepted her destiny as the worst person to live and stopped trying, really stopped, and probably died within four days, not that it mattered when she didn’t have anything to live for.

Mattering to  _ someone  _ was the last memory Catra wanted, but she noted its unlikelihood and resigned herself to one more disappointment. One of many to grow blurry and tear-stained but never less painful as time went on.

She wondered if Adora had meant it the times she asked Catra to join her. If she’d really wanted to keep her promise. If it really was true that she had no one to blame but herself. If she’d been so busy looking forward she didn’t notice the hole she dug herself into.

She wondered a lot of things, and then she wondered if she’d ever be able to ask Adora about them.

How beautiful would that be? Not only to be able to ask her those things, but to face her again and not lunge for the heart. To be friends again. To love her again, to grow together. To have something like Glimmer talked about what seemed like days ago but was really only hours, something pure and happy and alive.

Maybe, if she got the chance…

_ No, _ her mind screamed, and she flinched at the ringing in her mind from the loud shout.  _ People like you don’t get happy endings. _

People who opened portals that might destroy the universe and tried to kill their best friend and drove the only friend they had left away didn’t deserve happy endings, or middles, or beginnings. Maybe she was destined to this from the moment she was born, some unspeakable defect engrained into her mind since childhood.

Bad people didn’t deserve good things.

Catra was a bad person.

So why, she dared to ask, was she ever even allowed to know Adora, the only thing in her life that could ever have been described as truly good- and even then, it was too small a word, too fickle an adjective?

The universe, she decided, didn’t care what people  _ deserved _ . It did things anyway, with no rhyme or reason.

God, if you would, messed with humans like marionettes on a string, a grin on His face as he added meaningless trinkets of hope into the worst peoples’ fates. As He fed the fire of insanity with reassurance. As He killed their souls, one by one, and laughed at the cruelty of it all.

Inevitably, this made Catra wonder if she might get a happy ending after all. If fate was nonsensical and she was a demon, what did it matter? But she scoffed the notion away, disgusted with herself.

Always with the excuses. As if anything could explain away hurtt from a wound in the heart that would never heal.

She should know. It was unforgivable.

And a part of her, in the very back of her mind, began to whisper. What did she have to lose? When she would likely go to Hell on Etheria or the Underworld beneath it every day of her life, atonement for her neverending sins, who was to say that she couldn’t do good for once?

It had been years and years and years of tearing things apart. Maybe- just maybe- she could feel, only once, what it was like to mend.

Maybe fate would allow bad people to be heroes and good people unhappy endings.

Maybe fate didn’t exist; or if it did, she should give it the middle finger and walk away.

Maybe it was time to do what she wanted for once in her goddamn life.

_ I know you didn’t mean it. _ Adora’s voice flashed through her mind, a silver sliver of memory before it disappeared.

No. She hadn’t meant it. Not any of it.

But maybe she would, this time.

Maybe she’d go down in fucking flames. She deserved a brilliant ending, she thought. Maybe not soft, or pretty, or sweet, but brilliant. Brilliant would do just fine.

Catra opened her mouth, tears running down her face, a fucking mess for the whole world (or at least this ship) to see, and she screamed.


End file.
